


Thirty Hours

by cruisedirector



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, Declarations Of Love, Dialogue Heavy, Episode: s02e25 Resolutions, F/M, Frottage, Love Confessions, Making Love, Meteor, Monkeys, New Earth, Oral Sex, Poetry, Romance, Stargazing, Tears
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1996-08-30
Updated: 1996-08-30
Packaged: 2017-10-06 21:39:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first aftermath story I tried to write. Lots of sap and some sniffling, no resolutions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thirty Hours

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first "Resolutions" story I kept trying to write after the episode first aired, but it depressed me. I don't think it really has a resolution, but then why should I be held to a higher standard than Voyager's writing staff? I recommend that you read some of the very fine "Resolutions" fan fiction in Now Voyager's archive, particularly "Revelations" by L.R. Bowen and "Resolve" by Diane Nichols.

She was asleep, her head on his chest, hair spread like a fan across his shoulder and bicep which circled her tightly. He was torn between wanting to talk to her and wanting to let her sleep in his arms this last night. After the physical labor of packing and moving their belongings, fighting the knot in his throat which he couldn't seem to swallow, he was full of adrenaline, unable to sleep himself.

An hour earlier they had tried to make obliterating love, one last hurrah. They had only succeeded in frustrating each other and embarrassing themselves, opening a chasm between them. But that might end up being a blessing in disguise, when he had to reacquaint himself with distance--tomorrow, when he would be separated from her by two meters and half a galaxy on the bridge. Afterwards, she had rested on her back, not looking at him, while they joked about not being able to concentrate with the ship coming back. He'd wondered if she felt the same way he did--unfathomable sorrow at their captivity arriving in the shape of salvation. Finally she turned and buried her face against him, letting the rise and fall of his chest lull her to sleep.

The first night, he hadn't wanted to move, either. He was afraid of changing too much, too quickly, he could have sat there for hours just holding her hand. If she hadn't cried any more, he might have. But every time she blinked, another tear would spill down her face, until finally she had to wipe her nose and they both started to smile. When he ran his hand over her wet cheek, she turned her head and kissed his fingers. He went around the table, pulled her up and stood with his arms around her.

"How long did you..." she started to ask. Then, her voice throaty, "How does it end?"

"What?"

"The story."

"My, uh, ancient legend?" They both laughed a little. "They lived happily ever after, of course." He took a deep breath, his face in her hair. "Feel like getting some air? We could take a walk. Unless you're too tired."

She looked up at him and then silently led him to the door, their hands still clasped. Outside, the night was filled with the voices of insects, possible including the one which had trapped them here. He sent silent thanks, moved towards the clearing he'd been turning into a holy place, where he had carved stones and hammered wood together, creating symbols for his life and hers. Praying for joining. He had thought she must have sensed the meaning of the totems he had worked into the headboards and the sand paintings, that some of her resistance to the things he made stemmed from understanding the secret desire engraved into them.

She stopped when they reached the edge of the trees, looking up at the sky-- saying goodbye again, he wondered? But she leaned back onto him as he gazed up at the alien constellations, watching a burst of fire shoot across them.

"Look, a meteor," she exclaimed, at the same moment he asked, "Think it's an omen?" Then he couldn't help smiling, thinking: she hadn't merely put on the scientist front for him, searching relentlessly for a cure, defining parameters; it was how she looked at everything, even the heavens. An old memory went through his thoughts, a snatch of poetry.

"'Rising and gliding out in the mystical moist night air,'" he murmured.

Without hesitation, "'From time to time, looked up in perfect silence at the stars.' Walt Whitman."

"Yes. 'The Learn'd Astronomer.'" He was shaken. Her head lay on his chest, so in tune with his thoughts that she could quote what he was going to say before the words came clear in his own mind.

"I remember that from school. I love Walt Whitman."

"I love you."

He felt her tremble. She twisted to put her arms around him, face pressed into his throat, and began to cry quietly. "Do you know how long--I'm sorry--"

"It's all right--"

"Would you just keep telling me that?"

"Kathryn. I love you." He told her everything he'd wanted to tell her for all the months before, as many ways as he could think to say it, while she clung to him. They sank down onto the damp grass together, with her curled in his lap, arms wrapped around his neck. He'd fantasized about this, even her breaking down like this when he told her, but never really expected it, it had been impossible to imagine her trusting him this much. In the darkness of the trees, even the insects fell silent as they sat, the late night turning into early morning. She lifted her head against the side of his face when he stopped murmuring endearments, as if it were some sort of signal.

"I love you, too," she said.

He had not known that he was holding back, had not thought he could feel more strongly than he already did, but he wept in her hair when she spoke. She sniffled, but he could feel the curve of her smile against his cheek. "I'm sorry, I think I'm all cried out. Do you forgive me?"

He nodded into the top of her head. "If you say it again."

"I love you."

"I love you."

"We sound like a bad holorecording."

"No one's listening." At that precise moment the monkey screeched. "HEY!" he growled.

Somehow the mood was not broken even though they laughed and separated to look at each other. He thought about kissing her, but it was enough just to sit and regard her expression. They had all the time they would ever need. He shifted and pulled her to her feet, and they walked back hand in hand to the first place he had thought of as home since he was a child. The light radiated off her hair, making her glow, cheeks flushed with tears and the cool outside air.

"I guess we should get some sleep."

"Okay. Pleasant dreams." He expected her to take her hand back and withdraw, but she remained close to him, looking up into his face.

"Are you going to kiss me goodnight, or are you waiting for me?" she asked finally.

He kissed her. Very softly, one hand sliding into her hair to stroke her shoulders, enveloped in her warmth. She smelled like the night and the fire and whatever she put on her hair to keep it so soft. His body reacted so strongly that he had to repress disgust at his own lack of control. They were only going to have one first time, and he did not want to squander it in haste--he wanted to talk first, to know what she liked and didn't. To spend time discovering what made her happy. Again he started to release her, and was startled when she pulled him gently toward her alcove.

"Kathryn. We don't have to rush into anything."

Looking up at him, she smiled at his expression. "Are you nervous?"

"Well..."

"Good. Me too." The tug on his body resumed. "Do you think we could just hold each other without...rushing into anything?"

"I don't even know if we can both fit on that bed." She smiled as she reached it, climbing on one knee at a time without releasing his hands, He followed her hesitantly, waiting while she sat, then began to lie back. "Kathryn--you won't be horrified if I just explode?"

"I'll be flattered." Earnest surprise on her face, then they both began to laugh. He lay beside her and pulled her length against him, kissing her hair, blissfully happy. He wanted only to fall asleep spooned against her, reveling in the closeness and the fact that they had years ahead of them to be with one another.

He would have, too, had she not kissed him as they lay wrapped together. Softly at first, affectionate, over and over, their bodies moving in a slow wave which became a dance and then a rhythm. Her breathing changed, humming as she exhaled, her hands making circles on his back to press him to her.

"I think I lied about not rushing," she whispered.

"Want me to leave before it gets worse?"

"No..." She sighed deeply.

No sooner had she said the word than his body made its own decision. He felt the irresistible flood of affirmation rising, dictating his actions. He tried to pull back from her touch before he gave in to it, selfishly taking what he wanted. She let him roll away from her, raising herself up on one elbow to regard his face with concern.

"I'm sorry. I'm rushing you."

"It's just--I don't think I can wait--" Groaning, he clenched his teeth as she moved a hand onto his chest, raising herself over him.

"Then just let it happen." He could feel her pushing his clothes aside, fingers trailing on his skin. He tried to slow down, caress her, look at her face, but he knew it was hopeless--it was going to be over for him in a few seconds. And she wanted it that way, otherwise she would not have been yanking her leggings down around her ankles. He held her still, keeping them on their sides. Rigid, pressure building even when he didn't move, and she waited with him, listening to his breathing grow harsh with need. Just when it ached enough to make him cry out, she rolled him on top of her, wrapping her legs around him, forcing him to rub against her belly and lower--not inside her but surrounded by her warmth, a promise of what was to come later when he wasn't frantic for release and terrified of ruining things for her. "Let it happen," she whispered again. Unbearable joy convulsed him, he couldn't contain it, it poured out of him until he collapsed against her, passion still reverberating throughout his form.

"Kathryn. I'm sorry."

"Well, don't be." Her hands left a warm trail in the sweat on his back, cooling in the air. His heart was beating so hard that he wondered if the thuds bothered her.

"You're not disappointed?"

"Not unless you're planning to go to sleep now." She was trying not to laugh, but there was a slight purr in her voice which roused him immediately. Rolling her to the side, he turned her over in his arms, her gasp becoming a moan as his fingers began to explore. He made love to her with his hands and then his mouth and then he gave himself to her while she was still trying to catch her breath, reveling in her body, holding back his climax until her shrieks of pleasure had turned to sleepy, sated sighs. Both of them were too overwhelmed afterwards to be self- conscious, so they murmured inarticulately between kisses until falling asleep, crushed against the partition which they took down the next morning to push the beds together on the far side of the room.

They slept for hours after sunrise, the first time since they'd been on the planet when she hadn't risen with the dawn. He got up and cooked her breakfast, but she stopped eating after two bites, stood and walked around the table to lower herself into his lap, face contorting with emotion. He knew she still felt keenly the loss of the ship and the hope of reaching home, thought he would need to comfort her. Yet what she said was, "I can't believe how much of a relief it is to be able to do this." Then she unbuttoned his shirt, kissed her way down his body and made him so happy that he didn't eat anything all day, subsisting on sunshine and the faint traces of her scent on his skin.

A couple of weeks. That was all they had had, just enough time for him to have stopped counting the days, believing that they stretched unlimited into the future. She took to staying in bed in the mornings, a reversal from their early days on the planet when she rose with the dawn. Activities she had avoided previously, she now immersed herself in: gardening, improvements to the shelter, even mending clothes. Believing that she would get bored, he tried to find ways to help with the work--he enjoyed it anyway--so that she could read or study. But she adapted her interests to the practical scientific problems at hand. Keeping bugs out of the gardens, attempting to chart the plasma storms, devising new ways to recycle sewage all proved interesting diversions. They worked together on plans to build a generator which could use water power from the river.

She was remarkably uninhibited for someone so organized, unconcerned about how dirty or sweaty they were, throwing down tools in the middle of a project to sneak up behind him. It surprised him every time, though he had imagined that she probably made love the way she did everything else, enthusiastically siezing opportunities when they arose. In time his insides probably would have stopped turning to fire whenever she touched him, but that hadn't happened when the communicator shrilled and turned her back into his captain. He wondered what he would do, back on the ship, if she lay her hand casually on his shoulder as she had been prone to do before. These days when she startled him like that, he was likely to sieze her hand and kiss it, as he found himself doing several times a day--he felt foolish about it, but simply couldn't help himself, just to see the look in her eyes.

 

Now he might never see that look again. She stirred and murmured a little, stretching, and he wondered if she could feel him watching her as she slept. Once, when he sat on the floor of the shelter meditating with his eyes closed, she had told him that she could feel him studying her, and she had been right; his gaze might have been elsewhere, but his thoughts were not.

Ironically, he felt grateful to Seska. If she hadn't ripped away so many layers of his defenses, he would never have been so susceptible to Kathryn. And it would not have been so clear to him that these feelings were forever, had nothing to do with being stranded together--he would have felt the same way on the ship, or on Earth, possibly even if she'd arrested him as she'd set out to do. Of course he had recognized his attraction to his captain for what it was, and his respect for her as well, and he had been vaguely aware that something even stronger connected those things. But he might never have found the word for the feeling without having experienced its shadow. No matter what she said, Seska had never loved him--her feelings were selfish, greedy, they had almost destroyed him. At this distance, the way she had used him did not cause him pain as it had on Voyager; he could think objectively about how he had felt about her, and how he had changed. Even if he had never told Kathryn, even if she had never reciprocated his feelings, loving her had given him more than Seska ever had.

A wet trickle ran down his shoulder into his armpit. He glanced down at the face nestled against him. Tears were leaking from her eyes in slow tracks down her face.

"What is it?" he asked her softly.

"It's not home anymore."

"Voyager?"

"Earth."

"Oh." He was stunned. Earth had not been home for him for years, but he had never expected her to feel that way--no matter how long they were stranded, here or in the Delta Quadrant. She shifted in his arms.

"I feel so disoriented. Like I don't know which way is the right direction. I thought I would always want to go back."

"But you don't anymore?"

"I don't know. I didn't know if what I had with Mark was for forever, but I thought it could have been."

"Do you feel guilty?"

"Not about him. About the crew. It's going to be so hard to go back."

"Back to the Alpha Quadrant?"

"Back to the ship." For a long moment, she was silent. Then she said, "There's a lot we still haven't managed to talk about."

It was true: she'd never finished telling him about her family, or Mark, or the circle of friends she'd kept from Academy days, and he never told her about the things which had been driving him from Starfleet even before the DMZ treaty, nor the things calling him back into uniform before she'd found him and given him a concrete reason to wear it again. Somehow it had all seemed very far away, the distant past, not worth lamenting. He tried to think of a story, an analogy, but none came.

"When we first were stranded, Chakotay--you wanted to stay, didn't you? You didn't mind leaving the ship."

"When we were first stranded--you're right. I won't lie to you. I minded leaving some of the people on the ship. But being alone with you--no. I didn't mind."

"If I didn't care about leaving this planet, would you want to?"

"I would go anyplace that you could be happy, Kathryn. Even if going back to the ship means losing what we have here." Without thinking about it, he rolled her onto her side and began to knead the muscles of her upper back, taut beneath his hands. He knew he must be hurting her, she was so stiff--she seemed to be resisting him, pushing back against his hands with her shoulders. The moment he felt the muscles finally begin to unknot, her back sagged under his fingers and she burst into tears again. He continued to rub her back, fighting the urge to wrap his arms around her, crush her to him and hold her there.

After a few minutes she took a few deep breaths and touched one of his hands with one of hers. Her face turned toward their clasped fingers.

"I'm sorry."

"Well, don't be." He wondered whether he would sound patronizing to her, but she did not release his hand. He moved against her, close enough to feel the heat from her body but not close enough for her to feel trapped in his embrace.

"Not for sniveling. For what it's going to be like tomorrow. If I'd thought it through..." Her voice cut off and he let himself hold her, pressing his chest to her back, moving his arm over hers, his chin almost on her shoulder. She swallowed and inhaled raggedly, then spoke quickly. "I've made decisions before where I knew my feelings were clouding my judgement. When you went after Seska--I almost left you out there, not because of the good of the ship or command logic, but because I wanted to go after you so badly I didn't think I could separate out my needs from the needs of the ship. If B'Elanna hadn't made me realize that that time they were the same, I don't know what I would have done. I shouldn't even be telling you this."

"You're supposed to be able to confide in your second in command."

"Don't you see how dangerous it is for you if I feel this way?"

"What you're saying is that you felt that way anyway. Before." He stopped, trying to think about the implications of that. "Has it occurred to you that maybe we were creating as many problems trying to stay apart than we would being together?"

"It's not that simple. I have to trust your judgement to be unimpaired. And the crew has to trust both of us."

"Look, let's not pretend we can settle this now. Let's assume that we'll go back to the ship and it will be difficult regardless, and any decisions we make now might have to change. Tuvok said thirty hours. Let's take what's left of them and make one another happy. My people have a saying..."

"No."

"No?"

"No ancient legends." Her voice was in full command mode, but then she shook her head and began to laugh shakily. "I think you tell me these stories just to see if I'll shut you up."

"Will you shut me up?"

She rolled over and kissed him on the mouth. "What's the saying?"

"What?"

"The saying your people have...?"

"Oh." He grinned sheepishly. "'Sometimes the best way to proceed is to admit you can't find the trail.'" He traced a line from her jaw down her body lightly. "Or at least, define no parameters. Can you live with that?"

She kissed him, softly, and again. Her hands were warm on his body, which was relaxing slowly. "We haven't resolved anything," she murmured, and turned her body under his. "I guess we'll see what happens from here."


End file.
